


A Topographical Study of Jemma Simmons

by memorizingthedigitsofpi



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Recovery, Romance, and continuing to season 3, i believe in happy endings, starting with early season 2, will almost certainly diverge from canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 04:12:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5033248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memorizingthedigitsofpi/pseuds/memorizingthedigitsofpi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Fitz tries to explain all that she means to him, he always falls back on science. When he calls her his Earth or his Moon or his Stars, there's so much more thought behind the metaphor, so many details that together make up *her*. But finding the right words isn't as easy as it once was. They're all jumbled in his head and coming out wrong, and he wants to make this perfect for her. He has to. For her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> This fic was created to help a wonderful human being study her English vocabulary text book. As a result, all of the words from her text are underlined. If this makes for difficult reading, let me know and I'll change the formatting.

Fitz groaned and wiggled his fingers, shaking his head from side to side like a wet dog and then stopping to stare once more at the blank screen in front of him.

"Ridiculous," he muttered under his breath. 

His therapist wanted to him to try "word mapping" as a way of regaining his lost vocabulary. Apparently, writing lists of related words was supposed to help him in some way? To say he was skeptical would be an understatement. He didn't even know where to  _begin_ with an exercise like this. Was he just supposed to start listing things in the room?

  * pencil
  * chair
  * computer
  * desk
  * absolute bloody moron who can't remember what that black bucket thing on the floor that you put the stuff you don't want in is called



He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and let his head drop into his hands. "Argh!" he groaned in frustration, his hands pulling at his hair. Why couldn't he just  _think_ like he used to? Why did he have to be so bloody  _useless_ with words?

A hand on his shoulder made him jump, and then he was looking up at the face of a sympathetic Skye. Instead of making him feel better, her sympathy just made him feel more like crap. He hated feeling pitied. 

"Everything okay?" she asked, and he hated how unsure she sounded. She looked like she was scared he might blow up in her face, and he had to admit her fear was justified. He'd certainly done it on more than one occasion since his near-drowning, and it was happening more frequently now that Jemma had left. 

He gritted his teeth together and nodded as the feeling of being punched in the gut overwhelmed him again. He was broken, and Jemma had left, and he really couldn't blame her for not wanting a useless idiot like him anymore. If she ever really had. 

There'd been a moment, several in fact, when he'd woken up in hospital and she'd been by his bedside and he'd... hoped. Foolishly, as it had turned out, but he'd hoped, and now that hope was as gone as she was and all he had to fill the hole she'd left was physio and speech therapy. 

It was hardly an even trade.

Skye tried to look cheerful but her smile was obviously fake. "Whatcha workin' on?" she asked, sitting on the edge of his desk and turning to look at his monitor.

His hand jerked out and tried to turn it off, but his stupid useless hand wouldn't do what his brain was telling it to and instead he just knocked over a cupful of pens on the desk beside it. 

"Damn it!" he exploded, slapping the desk with his palm. 

Skye jumped and looked at him nervously, obviously wondering if he was going to have a full on temper tantrum like he'd been doing so often. He blew out a frustrated breath and stood up to clean up the mess. 

"Sorry," he mumbled, not looking at her. 

"It's alright, Fitz," she said, smiling more genuinely and reaching out to help him.

"Leave it," he said, more shortly than he'd intended, and she jumped again at the sharpness in his tone. "I mean," he sighed and closed his eyes, trying to calm himself down. "I mean, I can get it myself," he said in a more modulated voice. 

"I know," Skye said, looking at him with a significance much larger than her words and resting her hand on his arm. "But you don't have to."

Fitz lip quavered despite his best efforts to stop it from doing so, and he found himself unable to hold her gaze. Looking down, he covered her hand with his own and let out a shaky breath as he squeezed it. 


	2. Chapter 2

"Well, let's see what you've done this week, shall we?" Dr. Bouchard asked in an overly cheerful lilt as she opened the file he'd emailed her before their meeting.

Her sunny disposition was more stifling than the hot air of her office. He sweltered every time he was forced to visit her. Honestly. She was working with sick people, here. Couldn't she open a window? It felt like there wasn't even a breath of wind anywhere in the entire building.

Fitz glared balefully at her from his slouched position in the chair opposite her desk, his arms crossed sullenly over his chest. "Hardly bloody anything," he grumbled, his face a thunderstorm and his eyes like flashes of lightning.

"And why is that?" she asked, the barometer of her tone now pointing to frosty instead. She raised the contour line of one perfectly-shaped eyebrow and waited expectantly for his response.

Fitz's eyes moved from her face down to her desk, her blonde eyebrow reminding him too much of the brown one he couldn't see anymore. He charted out the landscape of the carved wood, mapping it with his engineer's eyes, analyzing the hollows and crevices of decorative leaves and trying not to think about... her.

He shrugged, biting down on his lip to stem the flood of emotions suddenly overwhelming him. They were never dormant for long, but they still surprised him every time they erupted, burning him up in a wildfire of feelings. He blinked his eyes to clear them of the mist that threatened to turn into tears. 

Why'd he have to cry so bloody easily? 

"Fitz?" she asked gently, her voice thawing, and he knew that she knew he wanted to cry. 

His leg jangled rapidly for a moment, a tremor more aftershock than earthquake, but it still unnerved him how little he could control his body when he got upset. Quickly grabbing the arms of the chair, he pushed himself upright, spinning in a sudden cyclone away from her desk and trying to will away the swells of salt water that threatened to spill across his cheeks. 

"I just don't see," he said, folding his arms tight in front of him and pulling his shoulders inward as if to make himself disappear. "I don't..." He clenched his eyes shut, frustration overwhelming his sadness as he couldn't find the words. "I can't..." He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and middle finger of his right hand and his left flopped willy nilly next to his head. 

"Breathe, Fitz," Dr. Bouchard said calmly. "Take a deep breath and hold it."

He drew in a shaky breath and let it out in a gust that left him feeling even emptier than he'd felt when he'd woken up and she'd been gone. She'd left a chasm in her place, and he was standing on a cliff, a precipice, above a sheer drop.

He did it again, and this time the gust was a breeze instead of a gale. His shoulders slackened as he regained control, and his hands dropped to his sides. 

"Do you want to talk about what just happened?" Dr. Bouchard asked, and he appreciated the fact that she'd reverted to clinical rather than caring.

He'd had enough of bloody _caring_. People  _cared_ about him so much they strangled him, suffocated him with their attempts at  conservation. He  _wasn't_ the same Fitz he used to be, and he needed them to stop reassuring him he  _was_.

"Not really," he said, keeping the lid on his volcano of emotions this time. After another deep breath, he turned back around and his overcast face cleared up.

Dr. Bouchard sized him up for a moment, obviously deciding whether or not to push, before she nodded and turned to her monitor, double-clicking her mouse. That same eyebrow rose up again as she looked at his pathetic attempt at a list, but this time he was prepared for it, ready for the tidal wave of grief that washed over him. 

"It looks like you might need more...  _guidance_ than my usual client," she said, looking at him with a half-smile. He knew that look. He'd just made himself into a challenge for her, and she didn't seem the type to back down.

"Any guidance  _at all_ would be..." Fitz started in a snarky tone before drifting off into silence as the word escaped him. "Be..." he frowned in consternation and felt his hand start its  seismic dance again.

He looked at Dr. Bouchard, waiting for her to give him the word he needed, but instead she leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and waited.

"Yes?" she said expectantly. 

Fitz ground his teeth together, not willing to let her win. "I'd like that," he spit out. 

"Excellent," she smiled, leaning forward again. "Have a seat, and we'll talk out what you're going to do next."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now we've got the underlined words. Lemme know if it's too distracting this way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've narrowed this down to pre-season 2, post-coma in terms of time

Fitz struggled his way into his shirt, cursing once more the depletion of his self-sufficiency.

He could do tshirts just fine: that was just pulling it on over his head, and if his hand went all wonky then no harm done. It was his button-ups that were the problem. No matter what he did, he couldn't seem to get his hand to cooperate with the small buttons. Instead, he had to struggle them, already pre-buttoned by Skye, over his head and the tshirt below. It was a ridiculous process that ended in him feeling like a swampy, sweaty mess if he wasn't careful, and it always took him half the day to get the material to sit right on his frame. He'd taken to tugging on his hem in an attempt to settle it properly, and no amount of pretending it was the 'Picard Maneuver'* made him feel better about its necessity.  

At least with his shirt untucked you couldn't tell that he'd had to replace the button on his jeans with velcro.

Padding over to his mirror, he ran a hand through his hair and sighed at his reflection. For a moment his eyes hazed over and the face in front of him was eclipsed by his memory of what he used to look like. Then he blinked, and the gulf opened up between what he had been and what he was now. With a sigh, he surveyed the extent of the disaster that looked back at him out of the glass and for the third day in a row decided he wasn't yet up to trying to shave again. His last attempt had rather devastated the region, and he had the soon-to-be-scarred lip to prove it.

He grabbed a cardigan to help with the chill that always seemed to permeate this freezing underground lair they were holed up in, and he almost wished he were back in the comparatively scorching office of his therapist. 

Wandering out of his room, he shuffled his way against the prevailing wind of purposeful pedestrians to his little corner of the lab where he was out of everyone's way without being completely out of the loop. He wasn't cleared to work on anything for S.H.I.E.L.D. or whatever they were calling themselves these days, but he liked to sit in there to work on his crap therapy homework. 

His desk chair squeaked a bit as he settled into it. It had been doing that ever since their move into this space, but the amount of energy consumption required to fix it seemed beyond him these days. Get up, get dressed, drag himself to the lab... that was about the extent of his physical exertions. Anything more just seemed like... effort. Frankly, the only reason he showered as often as he did was because he knew if he let himself go   _too_ much, they'd send him back to stay in hospital again like last time. 

Funny how his life used to be full of ideas and science and...

Anyway, now it just revolved around not being sent to the loony bin.

Talking of...

Fitz swiveled in his squeaky desk chair and logged into his computer. Even doing that was so much more difficult than it ever used to be. Once upon a time, he'd been able to type in his user name and password with a rapid press of keys while having a conversation or mentally mapping out a schematic or doing a partial differential equation in his head. Now, however, he had to furrow his brow and clench his teeth as his fingers probed slowly at the keys. 

Oh, he'd  _tried_ speech recognition software, but between his aphasia and his accent it always ended up a mess of  unpredictable disasters.

Sighing out a gentle gust of wind that shuffled the papers on his desk, he opened up a blank document and stared at the cursor flashing on the screen. It was trying valiantly to get him to write, but a deluge of words completely failed to pour down out of his fingertips. Shockingly enough.

"Just write," Dr. Bouchard had said, as if it were something easy to do.

When he'd asked her for some  _specifics_ , she'd rolled her eyes at him and told him to write what he knew. Well, what he  _knew_ was theoretical physics and aerospace engineering and fluid dynamics and...

The memory of her hit him with such force he wouldn't have been surprised if it had registered on the Richter Scale. It flowed along his fault lines and ripped a continental divide through his psyche. A landslide of feelings tumbled over him, threatening to drown him in their wake, and suddenly it was hard for him to breathe and the water was rushing in, covering him in a swift-flowing tide of spray that carried him out into the ocean while leaving him behind.

Unbidden, a gasping moan worked its way out from between his lips, and he closed his eyes tight, fighting to swim against the stream of his own memories. He was caught in a monsoon of tiny details: the blue light of the pod, the tears in Simmons' eyes, the sudden gurgling silence that cut off her scream when the water...

"Focus on your breathing," he heard Dr. Bouchard say in her calm, French accent. "Breathe in and hold it, and then breathe out. Remember to breathe and everything else can wait."

Forcing himself, knuckles white and fists clenched with the effort, he dragged in a ragged breath. It wasn't enough to disperse the thoughts, but it was enough to make them less real. Less present. Less all-encompassing. As he continued to breathe, the typhoon of images calmed to a drizzle, and the fog that had clouded his vision began to fade. Slowly, the lights and sounds of the lab began to penetrate the mist. It had happened again.

He looked around, hoping no one was paying attention to him.

He needn't have worried. They never did. 

Reaching out a shaking hand, he turned his monitor off. He wouldn't be writing today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *[The Picard Maneuver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2o77i74T48) \- for those of you who were confused


End file.
